Delusion?

[Angrboda]

No, lol, I assure you, I know better than to trust my own mind. I handled this objection in my previous (meaningful) post. Belief in demons (or alien abductions) is not delusional. A hallucination that trends towards demons (or alien abductions) is not pathological. Unless it is persistent. People who describe being abducted over and over again, people who describe experiences with demons over and over again (they're everywhere after all) would seem to fit the requirements for diagnosis as delusional(though I'm sure you could find cases where other variables were at play). I'm not a mental health specialist, so this is just a lay persons understanding of the requirements obviously. I'm sitting here reading the DSMV as well as the wiki page on delusions (sourced from the DSMV and a whole host of other places) and both indicate that delusions within a religious framework are exceedingly common. Is this incorrect? Is the DSMV or the Wiki page misleading me as to the conditions for diagnosis as delusional?

Believing in demons is fanciful but not delusional, agreed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion

Hallucinations are in fact a pathology, but hallucinations and delusions don't go together. More, many of these beliefs you are calling delusions didn't require hallucinatory experience to form (see quotes below). In general, hallucinations don't lead to delusions -- delusions operate on the ordinary raw material of plain perception; delusion is what happens to the percept once received. The two, in general, are not related.

More, delusions, as a rule, follow certain well known and recognizable forms: paranoid delusions; messianic delusions; delusions of grandeur (separate from messianic); and so on.

Now, in the context of this discussion, I'm willing to grant it only provisional status, but the diagnostic criteria explicitly state that if a belief is "normal or expected in their culture" then it will not be diagnosed. Many people may believe that a person's senses become more acute in the event of losing one sense, say sight; whether this belief is true or false, it would not count as delusional or pathological as it is accepted as a rational, normal belief in our culture; in that same vein, if you don't define delusion as error resulting from pathologically distorted cognitions, you end up diagnosing everybody as delusional (or more likely, simply those groups of people whose beliefs you don't like). And given that, historically, what we know to be true today differs from what we knew yesterday -- are you willing to diagnose all of past humanity as delusional (that's that flip side of arrogance I mentioned earlier).

Anyway, from :

Just as our current feelings about our parents shape our memories of how they treated us, our current self-concepts affect memories of our own lives. In 1962, Daniel Offer, then a young resident in psychiatry, and his colleagues interviewed 73 fourteen-year-old boys about their home lives, sexuality, religion, parents, parental discipline, and other emotionally charged topics. Offer and his colleague. were able to re-interview almost all these fellows thirty-four years later, when they were forty-eight years old, to ask them what they remembered of their adolescence. "Remarkably," the researcher. concluded, "the men's ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance."

Elizabeth Loftus, a leading scientist in the field of memory, calls this process "imagination inflation," because the more you imagine something, the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go.(Scientists have even tracked imagination inflation into the brain, using functional MRI to show how it works at a neural level.") For example, Giuliana Mazzoni and her colleagues asked their study participants to tell them a dream, and in return gave them a (false) "personalized" dream analysis. They told half the participants the dream meant that they had been harassed by a bully before the age of three, been lost in a public place, or been through a similar upsetting early event. Compared with control subjects who were given no such interpretations, the dream subjects were more likely to come to believe the dream explanation had really occurred, and about half of them eventually produced detailed memories of the experience. In another experiment, people were asked to remember when their school nurse took a skin sample from their little finger to carry out a national health test. (No such test existed.) Simply imagining this unlikely scenario caused the participants to become more confident that it had happened to them. And the more confident they became, the more sensory details they added to their false memories ("the place smelled horrible"). Researchers have created imagination inflation indirectly, too, merely by asking people to explain how an unlikely event might have happened. Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion."

I'll try to post more. On your latter point, since I suffer delusions (almost constant) as well as psychotic symptoms (less frequently), I can assure you the two are distinct.

Anyway, if I misread you, I apologize. I'm tired, and haven't had my morning tea.


ETA: I would recommend you look into the McMartin preschool case, false memory syndrome, and folie a deux. Quite relevant. Wikipedia may not be a good source for McMartin, but should suffice for the other two.